The security issue of a wireless network, e.g., a wireless local area network, a wireless metropolitan area network, etc., is far more serious than a wired Ethernet. A Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag also suffers the security issue, and it is also necessary to address effectively the issue of privilege verification between a reader-writer and an electronic tag for safe communication in the RFID. If the electronic tag with a high performance is somewhat capable of calculation and processing, an existing secured access protocol of the wireless network may be used or referred to so as to address the issue of authentication and privilege verification between the electronic tag and the reader-writer. However, if the electronic tag is only capable of storing data but can not process any data by itself, it may be difficult in the traditional security protocol to ensure the security of the stored data.
In view of the use scenarios and application environments of electronic tags, the electronic tags can roughly be divided into three categories: (1) an advanced electronic tag, which is readable and writable and is somewhat provided with a memory space and a calculation capability; (2) an intermediate electronic tag, which is slightly inferior in performance but functionally similar to the advanced electronic tag; and (3) a low-grade electronic tag, which is only intended to record some data information to ensure that the information can be read or written by a reader-writer and is typically provided with neither data processing function nor calculation capability, e.g., a pre-charged billing card.
For the former two categories of electronic tags, the security of channels between the electronic tags and the readers-writers can be ensured in an authentication protocol. The third category of electronic tags is merely a medium for storing information, and is provided with neither calculation capability nor memory capability for calculation and without identity information, etc. Despite the low performance of the third category of electronic tags, there may be a high security requirement on the data information stored therein to ensure that the stored information can be read and decrypted by only an intended legal reader-writer; and alike information written by only the intended legal reader-writer can be accepted by another reader-writer. It is obviously infeasible to accommodate this security demand in the existing authentication solution.
In existing security solutions of wireless networks, e.g., IEEE802.11i for wireless local area networks, IEEE802.16e for wireless metropolitan area networks, the Chinese national standard WAPI for wireless local networks, there are fundamental performance requirements such as calculation and data processing, for respective parties involved in the protocols. The existing security solutions are more or less applicable to the former two categories of electronic tags but can not be applicable to the third category of electronic tags.
Therefore, there is a need of devising a new security solution to verify the identity and privilege of a reader-writer to ensure the security of data information for the third category of electronic tags.